LeMU.waterbottle

A fear­ful thing hap­pened on Tues­day. Woke up, resume my desk­top from sleep, pre­pared to leave for classes, then noticed the the PC is off again.  It surely was not a power out­age, because then the com­puter would turn on when I pressed the power but­ton again…

This is one of the “oh shit” moment I really do not like to see.  Espe­cially not know­ing that I have to leave in 10 min­utes and can­not fix it until I get back.

con­tinue reading…

It is def­i­nitely infu­ri­at­ing and inex­cusi­ble to notice my domain name expired once again.  Appar­ently, it is the price I have to pay for not check­ing my email over the week­end… I call it BS, as the plug was pulled only one day after the ini­tial bill was sent to me from my web­host­ing com­pany, ByetHost.

If you faintly (or vividly) feels famil­iar­ity in this event, then let me con­firm the deja vu to be jus­ti­fied.  As a mean to stop this “annual facepalm event” to incur more humil­ity, I have made some arrangement.

It is called auto­matic domain name renewal. I hope it will do the trick.

龙年快乐！

I was won­der­ing whether I came out of closet–of being a fan­boy of Are­naNet.  Look­ing back to my last Guild Wars post, the answer is yes.  Oh and, in case you won­der, this post is about Guild Wars 2 release date! (True Story!)

We recently fin­ished our first closed beta test, and we’re now ready to hold pro­gres­sively larger events. In Feb­ru­ary we’ll invite select press to par­tic­i­pate in beta test­ing, and in March and April we’ll aggres­sively ramp up the size of our beta test events so that many of you will have a chance to par­tic­i­pate. And of course, this all leads to the release of Guild Wars 2 later this year.

Source: Are­naNet blog

Any­way, I’m pretty sure I won’t be part of the “select press” (read: var­i­ous MMO news/review sites), so I’ll bet my luck on March and April of 2012… to say “bet my luck” is accu­rate since this is not an announce­ment of an open beta.  It is cleared up in this thread on GW2 Guru forum by the devel­oper guy who wrote the post: the term “open beta” is pur­posely avoid as cur­rently Are­naNet are not arrang­ing a play ses­sion open for “any­body on the inter­webs”.  The spec­u­la­tion seems to be that there will be pre­view week­ends where the game opens up a selected area for a greater audi­ence to participate.

This of course does not mean there will be no open beta (in its con­tem­po­rary mean­ing) for GW2.  It is pos­si­ble the OB will come shortly before the game releases.

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「生存戦略、しましょうか」

Not going into the details which I’m sure you’d heard about it more or less.  I’m here only to say: Thank you, wikipedia, for risk­ing your rep­u­ta­tion to stand up against the Evil that is breed­ing in the US Con­gress before it becomes too late.  You are not only fight­ing for your own sur­vival, but much of the whole Internet.

Com­pany: Nitro+
Sce­nario: 虚淵玄 (Urobuchi Gen) (Puella Magi Madoka Mag­ica, Saya no Uta, Fate/Zero)
Art­work: 中央東口 (Chu­uou Higashiguchi) (Saya no Uta)
Pub­lish Date: May 27, 2011

Price: 4,620 yen

Home­page: www.nitroplus.co.jp/game/kikokugai/

Hope­fully by now every­body knows the name of Urobuchi Gen.  His gain of fame after a cer­tain plot twist in a cer­tain mag­i­cal girl anime is almost leg­endary, and then his pop­u­lar­ity reached a new high for his other work, Fate/Zero became ani­mated.  As a fan of both anime and Saya no Uta, Kikoku­gai became a must-play for me.  Yet due to I’m not good at han­dling old games, the thought of read­ing the visual novel made in 2003 always made me hes­i­tate… Luck­ily, the Kikoku­gai received a remake in 2011 in wake Urobuchi’s (and Nitro+‘s) popularity.

Even though the remake is no longer R-18, this clas­sic still retains the dark­ened attrac­tive­ness of a hard-boiled cyber­punk dystopian tale of revenge.

con­tinue reading…

Happy New Year!

I suc­cess­fully regur­gi­tated my old appetite of visual nov­els for the lat­ter half of my win­ter break.  Larger chunks of free time => less inter­rup­tion between start and fin­ish of a VN => good.  Last year has been a pro­cras­ti­nat­ing one for me, luck­ily only 4 or 5 titles released in 2011 that remotely inter­est­ing.  I prob­a­bly should work on reduc­ing my back­log instead of get­ting new games and poten­tially enlarge the said back­log, but oh well, it’s the new year and I need some treat :p

Aiyoku no Eus­tia (穢翼のユースティア) has been one of the most antic­i­pated visual nov­els of 2011.  Given its pop­u­lar­ity and praise on Ero­geScape after its release, it is also one of the best of 2011.  After beat­ing the main arc and two side routes, I can cer­tainly see the rea­son behind its high scores and favor­able reviews.  Aiyoku is like a Hol­ly­wood movie: high pro­duc­tion value with a tried-and-proven plot.  Though the game’s “Sword & Love” fan­tasy story isn’t exactly my favorite set­ting, but there are enough cli­maxes and twists in the story that kept me read­ing 3 AM in the morning.

Before I dive into HORRIBLE (HORRIBLE!) SPOILERS about the game’s end­ing and all, I’d like to rec­om­mend it to the genre, espe­cially those that are new to visual novels.

con­tinue reading…